Above: Soldiers prepare an RQ-7B Shadow drone for launch during Integrated Training Exercise 1-18 at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif., Oct. 19, 2017. The soldiers are assigned to the 70th Brigade Engineer Battalion. We’re roughly halfway through 2018, and one of the most important AI stories of the year so far is Project Maven and its fallout at Google. The program to apply AI to analyze drone video footage began last year, and this week we learned that the Pentagon plans to expand Maven and establish a Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.